Ever wondered if Google would mind if you had multiple ccTLD sites hosted from a single IP address? If you’re afraid they might not take kindly to that, you’re in for some good news. It’s not really that big a deal.
Google’s Matt Cutts may have just saved you some time and money with this one. He takes on the following submitted question in the latest Webmaster Help video:
For one customer we have about a dozen individual websites for different countries and languages, with different TLDs under one IP number. Is this okay for Google or do you prefer one IP number per country TLD?
“In an ideal world, it would be wonderful if you could have, for every different .co.uk, .com, .fr, .de, if you could have a different, separate IP address for each one of those, and have them each placed in the UK, or France, or Germany, or something like that,” says Cutts. “But in general, the main thing is, as long as you have different country code top level domains, we are able to distinguish between them. So it’s definitely not the end of the world if you need to put them all on one IP address. We do take the top-level domain as a very strong indicator.”
“So if it’s something where it’s a lot of money or it’s a lot of hassle to set that sort of thing up, I wouldn’t worry about it that much,” he adds. “Instead, I’d just go ahead and say, ‘You know what? I’m gonna go ahead and have all of these domains on one IP address, and just let the top-level domain give the hint about what country it’s in. I think it should work pretty well either way.”
While on the subject, you might want to listen to what Cutts had to say about location and ccTLDs earlier this year in another video.